Clarissa's Blog

Daniel Penny was found not guilty. It’s still a month and a half until Trump gets sworn in, and already wokeness is in death throes.

Proud of America.

Someone wrote to say I exaggerated the lunacy of Cristina Fallarás’s #MeTootery. So I brought proof. Here’s the famous Instagram message she posted, unleashing a media barrage that led to the resignation of a Spanish MP:

I had been warned about his treatment of women, but given his political position I couldn’t believe that was true, so I still continued. He is a psychological abuser. This is the dynamic he uses: be extremely nice initially to hook you. When he sees that he has achieved something, the rudeness and gaslighting begin (it’s always you who doesn’t understand the MP). In the afternoon he shows you affection and even makes relationship proposals to you and two hours later he throws you out of his house.

The MP is far-far-left. He claimed that people eat better in Venezuela than in Spain, and long lines for food are simply a result of Venezuelans being more sociable and choosing to hang out. So good riddance to that loser.

But look at the accusation that Fallarás posted and promoted. As much as the MP in question sucks, it’s not a good reason to normalize persecution of people because a casual date begins to pout. This is truly insane. There’s no person alive whom somebody didn’t find rude at some point or other. You can be the virginest virgin and a recluse, yet there will still be somebody who will feel slighted by you.

When I was writing about Spain’s crisis literature, I spent two years trying to get my university to order a book by Cristina Fallarás titled A la puta calle. Back then I wasn’t as rooted as I am now, so I had no idea how to get things done. I didn’t get my hands on the book, and as a result I’m only reading it now.

Fallarás is a journalist. When the Great Recession hit Spain, Fallarás was fired from her newspaper. She was 42 and almost 8 months pregnant. Spanish women delay pregnancy a lot, and Fallarás is lucky to have managed two kids. That’s something most Spanish women never achieve.

When she was fired, Fallarás tried to hold on to the hope of recapturing her lost life of middle-class stability. But the recession was separating millions from their jobs. Fallarás and her family gradually slipped into poverty and got evicted. While that was happening, she continued to get invited on all the TV shows with all the stars. Nobody could believe she was in such dire poverty that she had no food except for white rice to put on the table for her children. This book, A la puta calle, is about the lumpenization of middle-class people whose understanding of what life is supposed to be is crushed by sudden and persistent unemployment.

I haven’t finished the book yet but I want to mention that what Fallarás narrates sounds extremely recognizable. Her experience is exactly what happened when the USSR fell apart. People had to start completely new lives with completely new jobs that they didn’t know how to do or find. The entire class system crashed and a new one sprung up instead. Fallarás’s book transmits exactly that kind of a horrified bewilderment of the people whose understanding of how life works betrayed them.

Spain was hit for only 6 years and not permanently like we had been. It’s been better since then. Fallarás found a new job. She perked up to the point of starting Spain’s #MeToo movement and only last month ending an MP’s career for sometimes being moody with his girlfriend which is supposedly terribly abusive. Before you feel bad for the MP, I have to tell you he’s far to the left of AOC and a passionate admirer of Hugo Chávez. Spain, you know? A Communist journalist is destroying a Communist MP because some random chick had a less-than-stellar date.

In any case, my point is that I wish Fallarás’s book had an English translation because the entire neoliberal experience is right there. She’s a very gifted author, and her descriptions of what it feels to become redundant, inessential, and a wasted life are strong.

I really never thought I would ever hear a Westerner describe this experience as their own. It’s such a strange feeling, with all the memories that it brings.

I’ll share more as I keep reading but if you are a Spanish-speaker, you need to read it now, it’s hardcore. I took 2g of melatonin to fall asleep faster, wake up sooner, and get an hour of reading done before I have to go to work. I don’t do that for just any book.

I didn’t respond for a few days because, while I really like and agree with Kisin, it bores me to think about ideas with which I already agree.

Finally, however, I found a quote from Kisin with which I disagree. It’s an excerpt from a longer piece where he’s talking about the so-called “Woke Right”, agreeing that the term is clumsy and providing the following description:

The fringe of the Right which replicates every key aspect of wokeness:

– thinking the West is bad and siding with its enemies
– playing identity politics on the basis that their group is oppressed by a secret invisible force controlled by another group/groups
– having an obsession with group-based victimhood and grievance
– seeking to revise and pervert history to fit its ideological narrative
– reacting to disagreement with name-calling, ostracism and bullying
– creating a culture of fear among more centre-leaning people on their side to prevent criticism (you should see how many people message me privately to say they agree about the Woke Right but don’t want to say anything).

https://x.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1865824554737676465?t=CkrY8uGUG2plcNQkUVc_Lg&s=19

Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Candace Owens – Kisin means that kind of “the Right.” What these people invariably have in common is that they used to be on the Left and have now brought the foundational beliefs and intellectual habits of the Berkeley Left to the Right.

That’s why I don’t call them “Woke Right.” I call them “the Left.” Because that’s what they are, whether they are intellectually sophisticated enough to know it.

I don’t believe in self-ID in any sphere of life.

Kisin gives a long definition of such people but I find all of the points on his list superfluous except for the first one. The main, central, number one characteristic of the Left at every point in history is it’s hatred of the Western civilization and efforts to champion whoever the enemy of the West is at any given time.

Bullying, schmullying, culture of fear – that’s all vapor. The real problem with Tucker and Candace is that they despise the West and shit on its greatest achievements. Everything else stems from that underlying, visceral contempt for the Western civilization. People who don’t notice the shocking similarities between Tulsi and the campus “Queers for Palestine” groups simply haven’t been around such groups enough. I live surrounded by them, so I notice.

So yes, Kisin is great. And Candace is a leftist who is probably too dumb to know it about herself.

Here’s who Zhana Vrangalova is in her own words:

Dr. Zhana Vrangalova is the creator of the Casual Sex Project, a website where people share their true stories of hookups. She is also a New York City-based sex researcher, educator, writer, and frequent media consultant. She holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University, and studies casual sex, non-monogamy, and sexual orientation. She teaches Human Sexuality at NYU, blogs for Psychology Today, and tweets obsessively about new sex research.

Strangely, there’s no outrage against her while people were foaming at the mouth about the woman with the “smells in literature” dissertation.

When I was leaving the classroom on the last day of class in my translation course, students applauded. This is normal in Canada but at my current university it doesn’t normally happen.

This translation course is the most demanding I ever teach. The largest number of written assignments, the lowest grades, hardly anybody is getting an A. I was an absolute bloodthirsty animal throughout.

The hardest course gets the most positive reaction. What does this tell us? Students don’t want an easy A. They don’t want to be coddled and treated like they are incapable. Young people aren’t stupid. They know they’ll have to make a living, and fluffy, feel-good courses won’t benefit them.

While Biden snoozes at boring, meaningless meetings in Africa, Trump is in Europe, meeting with world leaders who matter at an event celebrating the greatness of the Western civilization.

It’s almost like this is staged because it’s hard to believe that the Biden administration consciously pursued the policy of making America irrelevant.

Irrelevant decrepitude versus active engagement. It’s not surprising that the American people chose not to be irrelevant.

I was looking for a good, wholesome Christmas movie to kick off the seasonal activities. The first thing I found was this:

Spoiler review for the new movie Conclave (2024): 

(This may sound like a parody, but it’s not) 

It’s about cardinals that are to elect a new pope. There is an evil cardinal who is conservative and against Islam. There is another cardinal who is good and humble. Then near the end, the good and humble cardinal gives a speech about how we should not be prejudiced against Muslims. Everyone claps and vote for him as pope. Ralph Fiennes character then finds out that the newly elected pope in fact has a uterus, and is an intersex genetic woman. He decides that the right thing to do is to let the intersex person be pope nonetheless.

https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1865179629314548170?t=KspEUUMvYgdOBkB8nvRI2w&s=19

Well, at least I laughed while reading the synopsis. The festivities have been thus kicked off through a bout of laughter.

Very heartening developments:

In Duolingo you can now have conversations with the emo Lily, one of the cartoon characters in the language-learning app.

While I unleash long, confusing German sentences riddled with clumsy errors at Lily, N answers all of her questions with a heavy pause, followed by “sí” or “no”. He can say long Spanish sentences very well but the idea that a conversation with anybody outside of the immediate family might be more than monosyllabic does not appeal.

With me he’s actually very chatty which nobody on the planet believes because nobody heard him say much in years.

Klara also does Duolingo but she despises languages. She’s doing the math one instead. Like my father taught me what a thesaurus was at 4, Klara’s father has been talking to her about heteroscedasticity and beta binomial distribution since she was a toddler.

I had to Google how to spell heteroscedasticity.